Multilingualism and language awareness

One of the goals of the Wide Minds Comenius network has been to investigate how ICT, digital media and e-learning can facilitate multilingual awareness and language learning was carried out. The work package was coordinated by the Applied English Linguistics group at the University of Tübingen, Germany and involved partners, teachers and schools (from primary to tertiary levels) in and across the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany and Portugal.

Several main features were focused on:

·      foreign language learning

·      multilingual awareness (i.e. awareness of linguistic diversity)

·      (inter-)cultural awareness, competence and dialogue

·      linguistic and cultural mediation

The multilingualism work group focused on e-learning models and strategies as well as suitable ICTs (i.e. information and communication technologies) to develop multilingualism.. Special attention was paid to blended language learning  and to authentic language learning with culture as well as content and language integrated learning, ‘CLIL’. Moodle was used to guide and support learner activities as well as communication and interaction.

Here is a full presentation of our research on multilingualism.

You can find out more about setting up a language course on Moodle by consulting the Moodle guide Using Moodle for Language Teaching_v1.2 (pdf, 1.5 MB) on our Moodle page.

If you’d like to see language courses, please have a look at the courses teachers have implemented on Moodle.

You can also look at a course focusing more specifically on developing language awareness in a Comenius multilateral partnership. 

Hope this will help you find a lot of ideas to develop multilingualism and language awareness !